Sacred Tabernacles [part 9 of 9]: In Relationship with Our Mother
This is the final blog entry in the Sacred Tabernacles series. Still, as I release this finial installment, our world is devastated by COVID-19. The virus exposes the untended territories of our racism, hate, and inequality in ‘the land of the free’. While this series focuses on the destruction, reconciliation, and more intimate relationship with the natural world, this includes all the beings of the natural world. This includes our black and brown sisters and brothers. We must find our rightful place in nature standing next to each other, in relationship with each other, held mercifully in our our Mother’s hand. What is true of our relationship with Mother Earth, is every bit true in terms of our relationships with each other.
In Relationship with Our Mother
Doing something as simple as taking a step outside, taking time to listen to the birds, getting to know a particular plant is a step toward reconnecting, joining the natural world.
Mother Nature is longing for us too. She is ready and waiting for us, and will receive our desire to reconnect. She will reciprocate in response to our gestures and acts of gratitude and restitution. This kind of exchange with the natural world is only possible through our participation.
Dreaming Our Way Forward
Deloria, in speaking to the “sacred intrusion” of dream, asks “[at] what point does a dream/vision merge with ordinary life events?” (Deloria, 2006, p. 9). The accounts that follow in The World We Used to Live In describe various ways this sacred intrusion and the ways man does or does not see ordinary life through the lens of the dream.
If we choose to ignore the sacred images of dreams as a way to walk through ordinary life in connection with nature, what are we missing?
Jung illuminates what we miss when he says “this enormous loss is compensated by the symbols of our dreams. They bring up our original nature, its instincts and its peculiar thinking…. [T]hey express their contents in the language of nature, which is strange and incomprehensible to us” (C.G. Jung, 201CW 18, Par. 585 & 586, 2016, p. 80).
Our ability to offer presence, show up, and respond to nature’s call must surely be diminished if we reject the insistence of the sacred powers that want to align with us. Without opening ourselves up to the messages from the spirit world, we are ill-equipped for our walk through the world. Johnson, in Water and Stone, sets her intention to travel to Sámpi. She is then “gifted with dreams—dreams prepare [her] for what is to come” (Jaenke & Johnson, 1998, p. 140). Dreams of this kind are a reminder that we are not alone and have great resources in this vital connection—with Gaia, companions, nature, and self.
Dream portage. Mother Earth is calling us home. Deloria describes the unified field of interspecies relations when he states “in spite of different shapes and talents, the universe is a unified tapestry and not a collection of isolated, unrelated entities” (Deloria, 2006, p. 107). Here, Deloria again pulls us into the interconnectivity of all that purposefully exists. He goes on to share examples of how bird and animal not only provide us with “help” in the form of healing, protection, warning, or message, but that they also, and perhaps more importantly, provide verification of our connection.
As Jaenke and Johnson each recall their experiences of Otherworld and ordinary time, dreamtime and wakefulness in their article, Water and Stone: All of Nature Participates in Our Remembering, the authors empathetically allow us to feel, as Jaenke says, “the tension between [our] quest for rational understanding and [our] longing for mystery’s depth” (Jaenke & Johnson, 1998, p. 144). Jaenke and Johnson offer first-hand accounts of nature calling us home and of nature initiating relationship with us.
Plotkin (2003) suggests the dreamworld might be “the next step to take following a seminal dayworld interaction with an animal in the wilds. … dream might indicate when or where we are to enact a fast, or ...be one of the primary gifts” (p. 145).
In honor of my Celtic ancestors and the ancestors of the landscape, I began leaving offerings of bird seed, berries, and turmeric roots in sacred spaces in each of the four directions — north, south, east, and west. After doing so for some time, one morning I went to the space of the west to find a deer bone, a femur, resting on one of the cedar berms. I received this bone, a gift from the land for my altar.
I continued to spend more time with OakElm and regularly leave offerings of seeds and turmeric root. In alignment with Omer’s encouragement, participating in “creative ritual offers us an occasion to surrender to the guidance of spontaneously emerging images, enabling us to be carried by the river of imagination toward an unknown future” (Omer, 2005, p. 33).
It was emerging images and emotions that compelled me, in my longing for a deeper connection with Mother Earth, to invite earth dreams into my relationship with nature.
Not long after extending this invitation, I had an earth dream. In my dream, I walk in a dense forest upstream along a river-bed. There are others ahead of and behind me. Our feet sink into the soft, black, humus beneath our feet. A few paces ahead, I see a vibrant orange carpet made of ground turmeric root laid out before me, leading me to the edge of the river where I enter the water. Swimming in the river, the rich humus soil covers me entering my nose and mouth. I can taste the sweet earth as I am gently held and carried downstream. When I wake, the tastes, smells, and warmth from my dream linger.
Mother Earth holds us tenderly, beckons humans back into the web of life, and asks us to take our rightful place in the tabernacle of the natural world.
Remember whose shoulders you stand on, the historical shoulders, the transgressions of our ancestors, on this land where we live. Carry them forward with you as we do better. Today is the day take your place. #standingnexttoyou #kneelingwithyou
